Product

Meebo

Meebo is a communications and media company that provides instant messaging and group chat online. Sure, there are lots of things like this out there, but what I find unique about it is that you can integrate it into your website such that it can be used as an important business tool.

As a for instance, take a look at this brief portion of my main business website:

As you can see there on the left, I have not only integrated a Meebo communications tool into my website, but I was able to customize it so that the colors blend in with my site. Now see what it looks like on my other business site:

Once again, I have blended the colors into my website, though I did have to lighten it just a little bit so people could see where to write their messages, which is in that little gray area.

The thing about Meebo is that, if you want to, you can sign into not only Meebo, but many of your other instant messaging options such as AIM, Yahoo, MSN and MySpace (I don’t know much about MySpace, so I didn’t even know they had an instant messaging program). I don’t know if they’ll be adding any others later on, but I’m thinking that’s enough for the moment.

So, the question you’re probably asking is why someone would want to do something like this, or might need to. For me, though I haven’t officially done it, it allows me to basically have “open” office hours while I’m sitting in my home office, and if someone happens to visit the site and has questions, they can write me and, hopefully, I’ll instantly be able to respond back to them. It is located within your browser, unfortunately, but if you’re using Firefox, or have your IE7 set up for it, then you have access to multiple windows anyway. It does make a sound when you’re on another window, so you’ll get your notification is someone writes you a message while you’re online. And, on the other end, if I’m online it’ll notify the visitors of that, and if I’m not it tells them that also, as well as gives them an option to still send a message. That’s happened a couple of times, but unfortunately, both times the person on the other end never left any contact information, or told me who they were, so it didn’t benefit either of us.

Now, I did have one of my friends ask me why I didn’t add Meebo to my blogs. I can’t say that I haven’t thought about it, but I decided not to because the blogs aren’t really my “business”, and since I’m hoping it will be used more for that purpose than just general chat, it wasn’t anything I really wanted to dig into all that much. However, if you decided you wanted to do it just to be able to talk to people who might visit you, then you could use it in that fashion. This is a much different program than the chat program that’s a part of Woopra that Sire has talked about recently, which I also suggest you take a look at, though I’ve decided to stick with Google Analytics for now.

Oh yeah; Meebo is free, and of course obviously customizable. Give it a look, and if you want to possibly give it a live try, go to either my my business site or my SEO/website creation site and, if I’m online, say hello. Don’t forget to give your name, so I’ll at least have an idea of who I’m talking to.

Hey Sire, I’m still shaken by having you pop in and talk to me like that some days ago. lol True, adding it to a blog might be a bit much, which is why I didn’t go there; besides, with all the stuff I have, where would I put it?

Eh, what’s the worst that can happen, I’m not in front of my computer at the moment? Or, I just say, “hi! happy xyzday! sorry, can’t chat, but have a great one!”

I’m always on at the office, actually — we use AOL instant messenger for conversations that don’t require interrupting the floor or walking from cube to cube; it helps in the sharing of links, too, of course.

Nice post Mitch. I had used Meebo in the past when at work and I didn’t want to install AIM where my boss would see me using it but this is a cool feature I’d never known about. Great way to network with visitors on your site and something I’m going to look into further.

Thanks Matt. It is pretty neat to use that way, and I have to thank a friend of mine who hooked me up to it last year. Not sure why it took me a year to write about it, although, truthfully, I did write about it on my other blog last year.

Dennis, I don’t have to be on my site at all; I just have to be on the Meebo site. And, for how I use it, I only sign on to Meebo itself; I don’t use the other things, so I don’t worry about passwords and usernames at all. If it was something a person wanted to do, then they’d have to do it that way, and, as you saw in the comments from Josh, that’s how he does it, and I guess he doesn’t worry about it at all. When I want to do instant messaging, I use a totally different program.

Yes, you could do that if you wanted to, long as you had that widget on your webpage. For me, I think I’m going to stick with unannounced “office hours” and see if someone actually catches me there. My idea is to promote the website even better than I have to this point.